Sea of Crises

by Marty Steere

  They kept a steady pace, not fast, but not slow either. The trail seemed to carry them slightly downhill. After several minutes, they came to a dirt road. Matt turned onto it and pushed his horse to a gallop. Despite the increased speed, Nate found the motion easier on his sore tailbone. They rode for what Nate estimated was about two miles before Matt suddenly reined in his mount, turned and guided it down a narrow lane.

  Twenty yards in from the road was a windowless structure with a gated pen to one side. Matt jumped off, opened the gate, and led his horse inside. Nate gratefully climbed down and followed. Working quickly, Matt unbuckled the straps on his horse, lifted the saddle off and threw it onto a wooden platform. He slid the bridle off the horse’s head and hung it from a hook on the side wall of the structure. He then did the same with Nate’s horse. Peter in the meantime had unsaddled the black stallion.

  “This way,” Matt said. Closing the gate as soon as they were through, he led them to a door at the side of the small building, which he unlocked with a key, then stepped aside for them to enter. Buster took the lead, pulling on his leash.

  The building was a garage. There were two vehicles inside, one an old pickup truck with dented fenders and spots of rust peeking through the worn paint, the other a much newer SUV, black, with tinted windows.

  Matt took a seat on a stool in front of a counter that ran along the rear of the garage. A peg board panel with a collection of hand tools hanging from it slid to one side, revealing a series of electronic screens. Matt reached forward and pulled toward himself a tray on which sat a computer keyboard.

  With a couple of strokes, the map Nate had seen on the monitor just inside the entryway to the barn appeared on one of the screens. The same bright dots shifted slowly, seeming now to converge on a single spot. Two of the other screens came on, showing the front of Matt’s home from different angles. On a third, an interior view materialized. Nate assumed it was a room in the house.

  Suddenly, a dark figure appeared on one of the screens, moving quickly along the base of the front porch. The display showing the interior flashed brightly and went dark.

  Matt typed some commands, and the rest of the monitors shut off. He pushed in the tray holding the keyboard, and the wall containing the hand tools slowly slid back into place. He sat motionless, staring off into the distance.

  Nate looked at Peter. He knew Peter was thinking the same thing he was. Somehow, the people who had paid a visit to Nate’s condominium the night before had followed them to Idaho. Nate wasn’t sure how they’d managed to do it. He and Peter hadn’t used their credit cards. They hadn’t made any calls. There was no way the car could have been traced to him, was there?

  Finally, Matt stood. He nodded toward the SUV. “We should get going. It’ll take them a while, but they’ll eventually find this place.”

  Nate reached a hand out and touched Matt’s sleeve. “Matt,” he said solemnly, “these are not good people.”

  Matt gave him an odd look. “No,” he said after a moment. “No, they’re not.”

  4

  “Ok,” Matt said, “let’s have it from the beginning.”

  Nate glanced back at Peter, sitting behind him in the rear seat of the SUV, Buster on his lap. Peter made a face and shrugged as if to say, You tell it. Nate returned his attention to the road ahead of them, illuminated now by the headlights of their vehicle. They had pulled out of the garage in twilight, Matt at the wheel, and turned onto the dirt path they’d followed earlier on horseback. Almost immediately, they’d come to a paved highway. “East or west?” Matt had asked.

  “East,” Nate had replied. “We’re going to Minneapolis.”

  Matt had simply nodded and pulled out onto the highway. They’d driven in silence for a few minutes, each apparently lost in his own thoughts.

  Nate paused now, thinking how best to tell a still-confusing story. He started with the late call from Peter at the airport, describing Peter’s trip to Minneapolis, his encounter with the Gale women and the certainty that he was being followed. Matt listened intently, his eyes focused on the road. When Nate got to the bombshell about the Apollo 18 capsule, Matt looked over for just an instant. The warning that the man on the phone had given them drew another quick glance.

  Nate was struck by the otherwise calm manner in which Matt absorbed the story. There were no exclamations of surprise, and, though Matt asked a few follow up questions, they were each on point. It wasn’t so much that his brother didn’t care or wasn’t interested. It was, Nate thought, for lack of a better term, that he was being professional.

  The only time Matt displayed any animation during the telling was when Nate explained how they slipped away using a car registered to an off-shore corporation.

  “Oh, yeah,” Matt asked, “what country?”

  When Nate told him Anguilla, Matt shrugged. “Eh,” he said. “There’s better.”

  On the horizon ahead of them, a glow appeared. A sign announced that they were approaching Interstate 80, and, as they rounded a slight bend, a collection of fast food joints and gas stations came into view, their bright neon lights a sharp contrast to the darkness through which they’d been traveling. Just before they reached the oasis of light, Matt pulled the SUV into the poorly lit parking lot of a run-down motel and backed into a space in a dark corner of the lot, well away from the office.

  “Can I see that photo?” he asked.

  Peter retrieved his lap top, worked the keyboard for a minute, then handed the computer up to Nate. On the screen was the enlarged section of the picture showing the capsule’s serial number.

  “If you want to zoom out,” Peter said, “just hit backspace.”

  Nate passed the device to Matt, who studied the display intently. After a moment, Matt raised a finger and put it on the backspace button. He glanced at Nate. Nate nodded, then looked away. A couple seconds later, he heard Matt grunt softly.

  After a long moment, Matt said, “All right.” As Nate turned back, Matt handed the computer to him. The display had been minimized. Nate returned the computer to Peter as Matt put the SUV in gear and guided the vehicle back onto the road.

  When they’d merged onto the interstate, Peter, who’d been awake for over forty-eight hours, lay down on the rear seat and almost immediately fell into a deep slumber. Nate was also bone-tired, but he was too keyed up to sleep.

  Neither Nate nor Matt spoke for several minutes. Finally, Nate broke the silence.

  “Do you want to tell me about all that stuff back there?”

  “Not really.”

  Nate considered that, then said, “Sorry, that’s not going to work.”

  Matt took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out slowly. “I know. I just didn’t want to have go there.”

  Nate nodded. “Yeah, well, I think I’ve let that whole twenty-year disappearing act slide for too long now. Somehow, I get the impression what I saw back there has something to do with it. It’s long past time you explained yourself, don’t you think?”

  He added, “If it’s any consolation, I’m sorry we led those guys to your place. I have no idea how the hell they followed us.”

  Matt surprised Nate by saying, “They probably didn’t. I’ll bet they didn’t even know you were in Idaho.”

  Nate mulled that over. If the people who had broken into his condominium had gone to all that trouble to warn off Nate and Peter, why not Matt?

  “So you think they came to give you a message too?”

  “A message?” Matt repeated. In the dim light reflected off the dashboard, Nate wasn’t sure how to read his brother’s expression, but it looked almost bemused. “No,” he said, and his expression became serious again, “those guys weren’t there to deliver a message. They came to kill me.”

  That, Nate realized, should have shocked him, but, after all the mind-numbing things he’d encountered over the past twenty-four hours, it didn’t. Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for this, and it was uncharacteristically disorient
ing. Focus, he told himself. For a long moment, he studied Matt, so familiar, yet so different. What, he asked himself, not for the first time, had happened to his brother?

  Finally, he said, “You know who these people are.”

  Matt didn’t answer immediately. Then, with a barely perceptible motion, he nodded.

  Nate said nothing, waiting. Matt looked at him and tilted his head slightly toward the back of the vehicle. Nate turned. Peter was still stretched out on the rear seat, snoring softly, Buster curled up next to him, also dead to the world. He looked back at Matt. “Sound asleep.”

  Again, Matt nodded. Nate continued to wait patiently. They had time. A light rain began to fall, and Matt turned on the windshield wipers.

  “Right after basic training,” Matt said without taking his eyes off the road, “the army tapped me for Special Forces Assessment. I was near the end of that training when they pulled me out and told me they had an even more elite group they thought I’d qualify for. Something very special, they said, but also very dangerous. It sounded good to me. My head was in kind of a strange place back then.” He said it in a matter-of-fact way, but Nate could detect just the slightest tinge of regret. Anyone else would have missed it.

  “I was sent to a training facility in Arkansas,” Matt continued, “though at the time I had no idea where I was. I only know now because I went back a couple years later to do some instructing. You won’t find it on a map. It’s deep in the Ozarks, part of a large military reservation. There are no roads in. Access is by helicopter only.”

  Matt glanced over at Nate. “By the way, what I’m telling you would get me killed if they found out. But,” he added, “that ship seems to have sailed.”

  Unsure what to say, Nate just nodded.

  “The training was intense. By the time I was done…” Matt paused. After a moment, he said, “Let’s just say I was different. They taught me how to do things you wouldn’t expect a man to be able to do.”

  He glanced again at Nate briefly and shrugged awkwardly. “I’m not saying this out of vanity. Though, I’ll admit, for a time, I was pretty proud of myself.”

  “So, who were these people,” Nate asked, “the CIA?”

  “No.” Matt shook his head. “This organization,” he said, hesitating briefly, “this organization is a lot smaller and a lot less, I don’t know, conventional. I guarantee you’ve never heard of it. I’m not even sure what the official name is. Something like ‘Tactical Security Coordination’ or some other nonsense. You’d never guess what it really is. It’s buried so deep, I’ll bet the President doesn’t even know about it.”

  Maybe it was just a defensive mechanism. Nate wasn’t sure. But, after the accumulation of all that Matt had said, this last statement struck him as particularly ludicrous, and, for some reason, it irritated him.

  “Oh, come on Matt,” Nate scoffed. “That kind of stuff only happens in the movies. This is for real.”

  “I know,” Matt said softly. “Believe me, I know.”

  That was sobering, and it helped quell the irritation. Nate stared out the front window, watching small droplets slowly accumulate on the windshield, only to be brushed away after a few seconds by the wipers. Finally, he said, “What exactly does this organization do?”

  When Matt responded, there was a new reluctance in his voice. “I’ll tell you what I did. And I’ll tell you the whole thing, because,” he looked over, “you’re probably the only person I can tell. And,” he added, “you deserve to know.”

  Suddenly Nate wasn’t sure he really wanted to hear whatever it was Matt was going to tell him.

  “My first few years I was deployed in Eastern Europe,” Matt said. “It was an extraordinary time. The Soviet Union was breaking up, and there was a lot of jockeying for power in the former republics. The U.S. had major stakes in the outcomes. But there was only so much we could do officially.”

  He made a vague gesture with one of his hands. “Unofficially,” he said, “it was a different story.

  “We needed certain people to step aside. In many cases, they could be convinced to do so on their own. I helped do a lot of that convincing. If that didn’t work, well, there were other ways to get the job done.”

  The way Matt said it was very matter-of-fact. Nate was certain there was a whole lot more to it.

  “I was like the tip of a spear being wielded behind the scenes. Some of the things I did were a little extreme, but,” he hesitated, and it appeared to Nate as though he might have grimaced, “the people I did them to deserved it. Or at least I was able to convince myself that they did.”

  He gave Nate a quick, intense look. “I honestly believed I was doing the right thing. That I was being a patriot.”

  “What kind of things were you doing?” Nate asked.

  “We’ll get to that,” Matt replied.

  Nate resisted his initial impulse to fire back, realizing that Matt needed to tell this in his own way. Instead, he chose silence. Matt seemed to nod in appreciation.

  “In the late ‘90s, I started splitting my time between Europe and the States. Terrorism was the new threat, and, to be honest, it was lot easier to target those kinds of people, especially after 9-11. It wasn’t until…” His voice trailed off, and he was silent for a long time.

  They were rounding a bend in the highway, and headlights from vehicles passing in the westbound lanes briefly illuminated his brother’s face. Matt had set his jaw. There was a distance in his eyes.

  Finally, Matt blinked and took a deep breath. “In September of 2004, I was sent to Miami. We had intelligence that indicated a group of Middle Eastern terrorists was planning an attack. The Dolphins were opening their season at home, and, because of a hurricane, it looked like the game would be pushed up a day. September 11. The plan, we were told, was to detonate a bomb in the parking lot of Pro Player Stadium. There were suggestions it might even be a dirty nuke. My assignment was to take out the leader.”

  “Take out,” Nate repeated. He was pretty sure he knew what Matt meant, but he was hoping he was wrong.

  “Eliminate, remove,” Matt said. Then he gave Nate a direct look. “Kill.”

  Nate said nothing.

  “It was a quick in and out,” Matt continued, his eyes back on the road. “I’d done it more times than I could count.”

  He puffed some air through his nose, a mirthless laugh. “I guess I’d been doing it too long. I knew it wasn’t my place to question the operation. But the whole thing didn’t make sense. Why just go after the one guy? And why not go after the bomb? What if it really was a nuke?

  “The target was a Palestinian-American who’d been in this country for almost thirty years. His dossier made him look legit. He was employed by a trucking company and was the union rep. Supposedly, though, he was a plant, a sleeper agent controlled by Hezbollah.

  “Too many red flags there, but I didn’t see them.”

  The back of Nate’s neck was tingling, and there was a heaviness in his chest. For a moment, he considered telling Matt to stop, but he knew he had to hear it.

  “He and his wife lived alone in a small house in the suburbs. I was supposed to make it look like a heart attack. We had a particularly nasty gas for that. I’d have released it in his car, and he’d have been dead before he got out of the driveway. Even if there’d been an autopsy, and, for something like that, there wouldn’t have been, detection would have been unlikely.

  “But I had a better plan. I slipped into the house early in the morning. Tied them both up. Told the man I’d start removing his wife’s fingers one at a time until he told me where the bomb was. He claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. Said it had to be a mistake. Pleaded with me to let them go. ‘Course, they all did that. But there was something in the way he said it.”

  He paused for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s what threw me off. But, then again, I’d already blown it. I didn’t know the kid was there. I should have.” He shook his head. “I should have,” he repeated.r />
  “When she came through the door, I just reacted. Head shot. Close range. The wife lunged at me, and I took her down the same way. At that point, I had no choice. I stood the man up. He was blubbering incoherently. I put the barrel in his mouth, wrapped his hands around the gun and fired. Then I tidied up and left.”

  Nate stared at his brother, trying hard to shake the feeling that he was looking at a stranger.

  “I should have been disciplined for deviating from the plan,” Matt said. “But I wasn’t. Turns out the police bought the whole murder-suicide thing, and, apparently, my superiors were even happier with that than they would have been with the heart attack.

  “It didn’t sit well, though, and it gnawed at me. For months. Finally, I realized I had to do something about it. I’d accumulated a lot of time off, so I took it. Pulled in some favors. Started doing my own investigation. All indications were that the guy was legit. I discovered he’d been active in local politics. He’d been running for the state legislature and was considered a shoe-in. But he’d also started playing a role in some of the national races. One of the Florida senate seats was open, and the election was going to be tight. And Florida was shaping up to be a battleground in the upcoming presidential election. From what I could tell, the elimination of my guy had an impact on both races.

  “Could have been coincidence, but, in my business, one of the first casualties is coincidence. What I couldn’t find was anything supporting the notion that the guy was involved in planning a terrorist attack. Nobody else had any intel on it. There weren’t any other unexplained deaths that week. And, needless to say, there was no bomb at the stadium on opening day, unless you count the Dolphins, who really stunk it up that year.

  “I took my findings back to my boss. He wasn’t happy. We had words. To this day, though, I don’t know if he knew anything more than I did. And I’ll never know. He died of a heart attack a few weeks later.